Orleans and Birmingham. James Earl Ray traveled between these two cities in March 1968.”
More recently, two other pieces of information have surfaced to tie the KKK to MLK’s death. According to a 1993 report in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, rogue government agents in the South recruited KKK members for local ops during the sixties—and some of these Klan stooges were in Memphis on the day of King’s assassination. And, FBI records turned up by researchers Larry J. Hancock and Stuart Wexler show that Ray knew of a $100,000 bounty being offered by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi to kill Martin Luther King Jr before Ray escaped from a Missouri prison prior to reaching Memphis.
In his definitive book of the King assassination,
The KKK’s connection to Timothy McVeigh, the bomber who brought down the Alfred P. Murrah building in downtown Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995 is straightforward. When the FBI raided McVeigh’s house they found overwhelming evidence that he was a member of the KKK, which he probably joined in 1992. That said, he seems to have been a disaffected, inactive member who was more committed to other far right organizations, specifically the Aryan Republican Army, a group of Midwest bank robbers and racists, whose explosive kit he seems to have borrowed. Or been supplied with.
The Klan’s own take on McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing is a convoluted scheme whereby the Feds committed the outrage to blacken the Klan. Why, the FBI would go to such efforts to discredit such small political fry is unclear. Following paramilitarization in the 1970s, the Klan had split into some one hundred autonomous or semi-autonomous fragments, and declined until its main variant had no more than 2,000 members. The Klan’s place on the racist right of the US has long been taken by the militias and neo-Nazi groups.
As for the KKK running major companies with a view to lacing their products with drugs to make black men impotent, this is a plain and simple urban myth. Kentucky Fried Chicken is the favourite target of the legend, with the Colonel reputed to put saltpetre in with the spices, and have 10 per cent of profits put in the Klan coffers. Actually, the Colonel is long dead, and 10 per cent of KFC’s profits, even 10 per cent of the Colonel’s will—if it did a have a pro-Klan clause, which it didn’t—would leave a public paper trail wider than a four-lane black top. Marlboro (you get three K shapes from the chevrons on the packet!), Kools and Coors have all been the target of similar rumours that they are tools of the Klan. They are not.
Indisputably, the Klan has been involved in numerous local terrorist conspiracies over the years. As for the MLK assassination, there is no evidence to tie the Klan as an organization to the crime, but it is not beyond possibility that Klan individuals were involved.
Wyn Wade,
Worth H. Weller and Brad Thompson,
KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS
The Knights of Columbus society was founded by Father Michael McGivney, an Irish Catholic priest, in Connecticut in 1882. Catholics in America were excluded from many labour unions and fraternal benefit societies, and McGivney hoped his society would be a mutual help society based on the Church of Rome’s teachings. Like other clubs of the time, it adopted arcane rituals and promises, but ensured these not so onerous that they conflicted with the Papal ban on secret orders. Only Catholics were, and are, allowed.
The KoC is invariably and robustly right wing, and in the 1950s supported Joe McCarthy’s anti-Red witch- hunts. Nonetheless, it is lauded for its charitable works, funded through such exciting means as pasta nights. So popular has the KoC become, that it has spread throughout the USA and to Canada and Mexico. An Irish facsimile, the Knights of St Columbanus was founded in Eire in 1915, and remains active.
It may come as a surprise to the KoC members and their families attending the pasta night, but the KoC is actually nothing but a front for the Society of Jesus/the Bavarian Illuminati (take your pick) and is conspiring to overthrow the Protestant faith. Aside from swearing the Bloody Oath, which is the same one the Jesuits promise to obey (allegedly; see p. 492), members of the KoC, like the Jesuits, perform their initiation under the symbol INRI. According to www.biblebelievers.org.au, INRI stands for “
Er, actually INRI is the abbreviation for the Latin “
Still, never let the facts get in the way of a good conspiracy. Or indeed let logic be a bar. One internet site seeking to expose the Knights of Columbus reaches the exemplar in non sequiturs: “The capital of the United States is Washington D.C. which stands for ‘District of Columbia’. America was discovered by a man named Columbus. The Fraternal order Knights of Columbus have been exposed aided [sic] the drug trade in Colombia the country.”
KoC members have brought successful libel actions against parties proclaiming they uphold the Bloody Oath.
Christopher Kauffman,
KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE
Founded in 1854 by Dr George W. L. Bickley, the Knights were initially a ginger group for an expansion of the US southwards by which it would make a “Golden Circle” around the Gulf of Mexico. Bickley’s project had a particular lure for southerners, because the acquired lands were deemed wholly suitable for slave-worked plantations. And in this newly expanded US the South would dominate the abolitionist North.
When the geographical Golden Circle failed to materialize, the Knights turned to cheerleading for Southern independence. With the coming of the Civil War in 1861, the Knights thickened the plot by working behind enemy lines (i.e. in the North), where their castles (lodges) tried to sabotage the Union military effort. Especially active in the Midwest, the Knights opposed the draft, spread anti-war propaganda, organized politically to stymie the Republican party of Lincoln, ran contraband goods to Confederate capital Richmond, ran escaped Confederate POWs home, and assisted Confederate spies. Joseph Holt, United States Judge Advocate General, warned in a report to Congress that the KGC was involved in the “Northwest Conspiracy” to remove this part of the Union from Washington’s control.
But the KGC’s real claim to infamy came with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Northern politicians immediately rushed into ink to damn the Knights for their role in Lincoln’s murder. They had lots of suspicions, but little evidence. However, a century later, in 1966, the Northern accusation was retrospectively aided by the publication of a diary by John H. Surratt, one of those implicated in the plot to kill the president. A Confederate spy, Surratt was also a member of the KGC. Aside from an intoxicating account of the Masonic-like initiation ceremony of the KGC (see Document, p.308), Surratt drops tantalizing mentions of another KGC member throughout his diary—one John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s undisputed assassin. Although Surratt was quite happy to claim a role in a plot to kidnap Lincoln, he was at pains to proclaim his innocence in Lincoln’s murder most foul.
